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National School Boards Association (NSBA) Executive Director Anne L. Bryant and NSBA President C. Ed Massey will participate in the 2012 Education Nation National Summit in New York City next week. The annual event gathers more than 300 representatives from education, government, business, philanthropy and media to discuss issues in the field, and NBC is featuring numerous segments on education on its news broadcasts to coincide with the event.

The event will take place from Sept. 23 to 25 and will be web streamed live at www.educationnation.com. The agenda features a Teacher Town Hall, Student Town Hall, and the premiere of Won’t Back Down with a discussion before the movie. According to NBC News, the event “seeks to create a thoughtful, well-informed dialogue with policymakers, thought-leaders, educators, parents and the public, in pursuit of the shared goal of providing every American with an opportunity to achieve the best education in the world.”

NSBA encourages school board members to participate in conversations about education through NBC’s Facebook page and on Twitter @educationnation and share how school board leadership is making a difference in our public schools.

NBC notes that “Using the wide reach of the NBC News broadcast, and cable, and digital platforms, the 2012 Education Nation Summit will focus on successful examples of innovation in education. Summit sessions, moderated by top NBC News journalists, and NBC’s on-air programming will highlight a series of case studies from communities across the country, providing tools, and takeaways for participants and viewers.” Local NBC affiliates also may develop segments on education issues for their local news broadcasts.

On Tuesday morning, there will be “DECISION 2012 at Education Nation” with President Barack Obama sharing his vision for the nation’s education future in a taped interview. GOP presidential nominee Governor Mitt Romney will be attending Education Nation and sharing his vision for the nation’s education future as well as answering questions from Education Nation Summit attendees.

Additional interviews and sessions during the summit include:

Interview with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice

Interview with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

Interview with San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro

Addressing the skills gap: how stronger skills and higher levels of education can power America’s next great economic surge.

Additionally, NBC is promoting that this year’s Education Nation Summit “will highlight 10 case studies of schools and programs from around the country that have implemented focused solutions in their communities, and have seen demonstrable success as a result. Accompanying each example will be a robust digital toolkit with details on each program’s history, how it works and is funded, and its results. Case studies will be incorporated into the Summit program, as well as featured on-air across NBC News, and available for viewing and download at www.educationnation.com beginning Monday, Sept. 24.”

Glenn Cook, American School Board Journal’s editor-in-chief, attended NBC’s Education Nation summit in New York for the second straight year. Here are his observations.

You can’t blame traditional public school advocates if they were filled with dread when NBC announced that Education Nation would return this fall. Last year the network bought into the hype surrounding the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” inexplicably tying the event to a flawed film that exhorted charters as the pancea for public education’s ills.

Thankfully, NBC has learned its lesson. This year’s event took pains to correct past wrongs as it recognized the complexities school leaders face in managing a public system that is open to all.

Starting with a screening of “American Teacher,” a documentary that helped erase some of the “bad teachers” taste left by “Superman,” and ending with an appearance by former President Bill Clinton, Education Nation featured a strong balance of heavy hitters from education, philanthropy, and politics.

You also had a touch of celebrity — basketball player Lebron James, actress Jennifer Garner, and what amounted to a family reunion with former Gov. Jeb Bush and First Lady Laura Bush participating in sessions — but in this case, it fit the overall tone.

The key word here is balance. Last year’s programming was flawed because it exhorted simple antidotes to complex problems. This year, silver bullets were nowhere to be found, but calls for more effective teaching and improvements to early education were.

• Start with “Brain Power: Why Early Learning Matters,” a fascinating hour-long session featuring Nancy Snyderman, NBC’s chief medical editor, and three university professors. Held on Monday morning, it was the best, most concise presentation I’ve seen yet on why we need to reach children much, much earlier than we do.

• The dramatic rise in poverty rates was a focus throughout, especially in the session “What’s in a Zip Code?” moderated by Brian Williams. Poverty is reality for many people in today’s economy — Clinton was eloquent on this topic in the closing session — and communities must come together to do more.

• Education Secretary Arne Duncan was everywhere this year, participating in interviews with Tom Brokaw and responding to questions during various panels (a nice touch).

• We saw an entertaining back and forth between Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone and Diane Ravitch, author and professor of education at New York University. Their approaches are so different, but both made excellent points. Canada and Sal Khan, another Education Nation speaker, are scheduled to keynote NSBA’s 2012 Annual Conference.

• Teacher and student accountability, as you might expect, was a recurring theme. Michelle Shearer, the current National Teacher of the Year from Maryland’s Urbana High School, said teachers “want to be evaluated on things that really matter.”

“There are all sorts of different ways of looking at student growth,” she said. “Whatever evaluation looks like in the end, it has to be a system of multiple measures, because often what’s most important are those intangibles … that are tough to put on a check list.”

• At the same session, Khaatim El, a former member of the Atlanta school board, addressed the cheating scandal that has plagued the district he served for almost a decade. “We wanted to be the hype,” he said of the allegations, which are based on the state assessments. “We wanted to be the first to get it right so bad.”

But El noted the district also made huge gains in NAEP scores during that time, an achievement untouched but overshadowed by the scandal. “I would be remiss if I didn’t point to the hard work that many educators put in,” he said. “We focused on the basics. Literacy instruction in elementary school. Autonomy for principals. We invested in professional development. Those things were overshadowed by the cheating scandal. And they were good things for kids.”

The setting for Education Nation was not perfect — the big tent in Rockefeller Plaza is a good idea in theory, but the humidity and poor audio were ever-present distractions. And while this year’s session was far more substantive, future years should stop belaboring the problems and focus instead on how to solve them. Panels featuring districts that have been successful at “what works,” with ideas and content that are easily imitated and replicated, would be a valuable start.

Chances are good that will happen. The National School Boards Association (NSBA) had a strong presence in the planning and execution of the meeting. Anne L. Bryant, our executive director, met with NBC officials about the content and answered audience questions in a video Q&A format prior to the event. Mary Broderick, NSBA’s president, was featured in a panel session with the mayors of Albuquerque, Baltimore, and Newark.

“What we’ve heard from the last two days of this conference is that we need to come together around a sense of urgency,” Broderick said during her session, noting that it takes a shared vision between the school board, the mayor’s office, and the community. “The vision needs to be of excellence. If that cohesive message can be carried through our schools … there’s nothing off the table.”

After what seemed like an excruciatingly long week, NBC’s much-anticipated “Education Nation” summit is over. Coupled with the release of the much-hyped “Waiting for Superman” documentary, public educationand particularly teachers–have been under intense, and sometimes unfair, scrutiny.

Teachers unions are under the gun (particularly the American Federation of Teachers, which is smaller but represents employees in more cities than the National Education Association) and many times it seemed AFT leader Randi Weingarten was constantly engaged in a back-and-forth with D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

No doubt it is time to have a serious conversation about tenure and contracts (and the pension system). But we can’t ignore recruitment as welleven as many school districts are laying off teachers, long-term data show that many experienced teachers are getting ready to retire.(more…)